The Final Leg

The Final Leg

After the beaches came the caves. 

We started at the Natural Bridge Cavern in Texas, where we learned more about the punishment for touching formations in the caverns than the formations themselves. 

Our ranger guide greeted us with a somber warning – touch something in here and you to go prison. The State of Texas doesn’t fool around. She gave a steeled-eyed stare to the mother of a four-year-old boy and added “age doesn’t matter when considering persecution”. The mother tightened her arms around her son and frantically looked around for a way out.

I found myself watching the kid more than the scenery in the cave as we descended deeper. I’m pretty sure his finger skimmed a wall at one point but it was dark and hard to tell. The ranger either didn’t see or chose to offer the family a modicum of leniency. When I asked how often they actually arrest people, her response was cagey and guarded. The mother gave me a motherly stink-eye and turned her son away from the ranger. Thankfully we made it out with no police and zero felonies.

Still, all that law talk was fresh in my mind when we hit Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

New Mexico is way more laid back than Texas. The rangers greeted us with welcoming smiles. Sure, they did warn us at the entrance to the cave not to touch anything, but no one mentioned felonies or prison time.

I still stared in shock when I saw a dude in the cave. No, he wasn’t touching the man-sized formation next to the path. He wasn’t touching it. He was hugging it. His friend waited for the exact right hug before snapping the perfect cave picture. While he waited, something snapped in me.

 “You know touching a cave formation is a felony in the state of Texas,” I said. “There, you could get up to five years in prison.”

I figured they’d come back with some smart-ass answer. I should know what state I’m in. Or I should mind my own business. Or they weren’t touching a formation they were hugging it.

Bill didn’t wait for their answer. He practically ran down the path, putting distance between the two of us, hoping no one would think we were together.

The guy’s arms dropped from the formation. He didn’t say anything to me, but muttered something to his friend. I walked a little faster, Callie in step beside me.

We soon came upon a phone in the cave with a sign telling us to ‘call the ranger if we see vandalism’. Unlike Texas, they left it up to us. Callie asked if I was going to call the ranger. Her voice echoed in the cave and, although the hugging man was pretty far behind us, I started thinking about cave rage. 

A gun shot in the cave would wreck a lot more havoc to the formations than hugging would. It would wreck a heck of a lot of havoc to me, too. So, I didn’t stop at the phone and call. I stepped up our pace and soon disappeared into the bowels of the cave. Eventually we caught up with Bill, who seemed to have forgotten he was trying to lose us. We wandered through the cave without seeing hugging man again and there were no gun shots either.

Safely back in the RV, we headed across New Mexico to my parents and our summer family reunion. We got there before dark and, with me at the wheel, backed into our space in the backyard. This time we had a lot of help. People to hold open the gate, people to hold up the wires that swung too low, people to hold back the kids that swarmed around anxious to see yet another cousin show up, and finally people to cheer as we came to a halt in just the right space.

As with all reunions, food is a key element. There were twenty-four of us in all and dinners for that crowd take a lot of food. Luckily, we are a family of good cooks. My mom taught all of her children well and most of the spouses are right there with us. Plus there was lots of filling in with food from our favorite Mexican joints. 

After about three days, Bill asked, “Are we going to eat anything other than Mexican food?” We all scoffed and said, “Uh. No.”

Unfortunately that’s about the time he started getting sick. Probably not enough Mexican food. Or maybe too many in-laws all at the same time. In any case, we started seeing less and less of him as he spent time catching up on sleep in his air-conditioned backyard home.

He wasn’t better when we hit the road again. Although he perked up a little for The Very Large Array, it didn’t last. 

I drove. The roads in New Mexico are wide and relatively empty. So I drove until Raton Pass. I turned the wheel back over as we got close. I envisioned Bill screaming as we flew down the mountain, telling me not to put on the brake, telling me not to go too fast, telling me not to wreck, screaming as we sailed over the edge.

Callie, as usual, cracked up about the drab brown, “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign at the state border. 

Bill was so sick he actually fell asleep when I took over driving again. 

Eventually  we made it home. Safely. Even in the time to catch the Fourth of July fireworks.

At least Callie and I saw them.

Bill slid into his bed in our non-moving house and proclaimed, “One more day of vacation might have killed me... When’s the next one?”